Initial Metamorphosis Thoughts

Just attended the Pervasive Metamorphosis Cloud Integration Summit. This conference was held for industry analysts, Pervasive partners, and select customers. The big news from the conference was the announcement of Data Integrator Version 10 and the Pervasive Galaxy ecosystem. here are some quick thought bubbles on these announcements:

• Pervasive DI 10. This release appears to be a major overhaul of the product. I was not able to get my hands directly on the product, but the demoware looked great! The primary enhancement is a browser based (and cross browser enabled) design tool. So process models and data transformations are rendered within the browser and this looks to be a big improvement over V9 edition.
• Pervasive Galaxy ecosystem. Like a lot of companies, Pervasive is pushing a platform approach that will allow partners to build end to end solutions and offer these through an “app store”. This appears to make more sense for the Pervasive data cloud offering where customers can subscribe to specific services. Pervasive also announced some OEM deals (specifically with Intuit) where the integration technology is bundled with the overall licensing. Using the ecosystem in this manner makes more sense. It will be interesting to hear more about the Pervasive OEM channel.
• Speaking of the Data Cloud, Pervasive continues to roll out improvements in this space. They plan to support multiple “destinations” – currently leveraging Amazon EC2 (with options from simple Linux server to clustered virtual machines), but soon to support Windows Azure and appliance models for private clouds. The appliance option is delivered by Eucalyptus Systems. If successful, this option could be a challenger to IBM’s Cast Iron products.
• Back to Intuit – They discussed a pre-built connector between Quickbooks and Salesforce.com that imbeds the DI product. This solution has been around for a while, but had “some assembly required” issues. When dealing with the “Fortune 8,000,000″ that is Intuit’s target market, requiring integration configuration is not an option. So the OEM deal is interesting from several perspectives – this integration is prebuilt and installs in three mouse clicks, it is supported by Intuit, it works with both the cloud and on premise version of Quickbooks, and uses the Pervasive Data Cloud product. This diagram provides a good picture